Or, how the etymology of technology indicates the psychology of its morphology.

Taser = Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle

Taser = Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle

If you were a nerdy, bookish kid back in 1911, you worshipped Tom Swift. The fictional hero swooped through ice caverns in a battle-ready airship and leapt off the page to assault red pygmies in Elephant Land. Swift never left home without his handy electric rifle, which shot bolts of energy at his enemies with varying levels of intensity.

Sixty years later, NASA's Jack Cover invented a gun that shot electrodes instead of bullets. Cover chose to name the device after his childhood hero, and the Taser—Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle—is now a household name.

Robots = Slave Laborers

Robots = Slave Laborers

As science fiction will tell you, an uprising of the machines is inevitable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we brazenly call them slaves to their faces.

Karel Capek coined the term robot in 1920 to describe the androids in his science fiction play, Rossum's Universal Robots. The word robot originates from the Slavic word for hard labor, and the writer Isaac Asimov popularized the term through his Three Laws of Robotics. We predict that the first sentient robot will not be amused.